It is reported
that when T. H. Huxley first saw Darwin's theory of evolution by natural
selection, he remarked "how stupid not to have thought of that", and
many biologists had the same reaction when they read Hamilton's paper, offering
as it did a whole new way of thinking about evolutionary questions.

When
scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they
were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA
of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

But
new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between
people of different continental origins.

At
the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into
everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of
different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what
percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. […]

Certain
superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been presumed to be
genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source makes the link between
genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream blogs, in college classrooms
and among the growing community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the
question of whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.

Nonscientists
are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about
the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new
biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked
several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical
researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more
often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.

No
matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was
unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or
that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that
their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the
existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of
the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer,
means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”
[…]

But
many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking
openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to
discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that
as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at
what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time, and a
dangerous time.”

“There
are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said
Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s
not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the
potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it
better.” […]

Such
discussions are among thousands that followed the geneticist James D. Watson’s assertion
last month that Africans are innately less intelligent than other races. Dr.
Watson, a Nobel Prize winner, subsequently
apologized and quit his post at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long
Island.

But
the incident has added to uneasiness about whether society is prepared to
handle the consequences of science that may eventually reveal appreciable
differences between races in the genes that influence socially important
traits.

New
genetic information, some liberal critics say, could become the latest rallying
point for a conservative political camp that objects to social policies like
affirmative action, as happened with “The Bell Curve,” the controversial 1994
book that examined the relationship between race and I.Q.

Yet
even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that there may be
genetic differences between races is important in preparing to address them
politically.

“Let’s
say the genetic data says we’ll have to spend two times as much for every black
child to close the achievement gap,” said Jason Malloy, 28, an artist in
Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr. Watson for the widely read science
blog Gene Expression.
Society, he said, would need to consider how individuals “can be given
educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique
talents and limitations.”

Others
hope that the genetic data may overturn preconceived notions of racial
superiority by, for example, showing that Africans are innately more
intelligent than other groups. But either way, the increased outpouring of
conversation on the normally taboo subject of race and genetics has prompted
some to suggest that innate differences should be accepted but, at some level,
ignored.

“Regardless
of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to treat all as equal
before God and before the law,” Perry Clark, 44, wrote on a New
York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark, a retired
neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain the pretense that
inborn racial differences do not exist.

“When
was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100 meters?” he asked.

“To
say that such differences aren’t real,” Dr. Clark later said in an interview,
“is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the
band marches by.”

Race,
many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades, is a social
invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution. But when Samuel M. Richards gave his students at Pennsylvania State
Universitygenetic ancestry tests to establish the imprecision
of socially constructed racial categories, he found the exercise reinforced
them instead.

Population
genetics now provides a set of reasonably powerful statistical tools that allow
us to determine whether... genes that play a role in the brain evolve much
faster in certain human races than in others... The answers to such questions
could clearly be awkward, if not incendiary... [O]ne of the most obvious
questions about population genetic studies of human beings, especially human
races [is s]hould they be performed?... The interesting point - and it's not
widely appreciated - is that this question is rapidly becoming moot. Vast
quantities of information about the human genome now pour into publicly
available databases on a daily basis. These data are collected with the noblest
of intentions (often medical) and are also made public for perfectly good
reasons: citizens should have ready access to the fruits of publicly funded
science. Indeed it's almost impossible to imagine how one could stop the sorts
of studies I described above. In previous times, granting agencies, such as the
NIH or NSF, could block funding for undesirable experiments or scientific
journals could refuse to publish them. But with genomic data, minimal money is
required (an Internet connection is enough) and any bright graduate student
working in his parents' garage could ask and answer any awkward question he
likes. And the Internet thoroughly dashes any chance of preventing the
publication of unpleasant results.

... [T]here is no scientific basis for [Watson's comments]
... For one thing, science has no agreed-upon definition of "race":
however you slice up the population, the categories look pretty arbitrary.

Second, the idea that there is a genetically meaningful
African 'race' is nonsense. There is wide cultural and genetic diversity
amongst African populations from south to north, from Ethiopians to Nigerians.
There are, for example probably genetic as well as environmental reasons why
Ethiopians make good marathon runners whereas Nigerians on the whole do not.

To group the entire diverse populations of Africa together is a
characteristically racist trick.

Other scientists point out that our species is so young -
Homo sapiens emerged from its African homeland only 100,000 years ago - that it
simply has not had time to evolve any significant differences in
intellectual capacity as its various groups of people have spread round the
globe and settled in different regions. Only the most superficial
differences - notably skin colour - separate the world's different population
groupings. Underneath that skin, people are remarkably alike.

Damaging statements such as Watson's -- and the potential
for misuse of research on race -- has led many scientists to avoid the topic
altogether. In a 1998 "Statement on 'Race,'" the American
Anthropological Association concluded that ordinary notions of race have little
value for biological research in part because of the relatively minor
genetic differences among racial groups.

As Craig Venter, who pioneered much of America's work in
decoding the human genome, put it: 'There is no basis in scientific fact or in
the human gene code for the notion that skin colour will be predictive
of intelligence.'

... [T]here is nothing special about skin colour
that serves as a basis for differentiating humans into so-called races...
Curiously, we do not apply the concept of "race" to colours of dogs
or cats... [These] problems with our understanding of ... race show that the
criticism being levelled at Watson is based on science rather than political
correctness... race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one.

Well, it's good to see that Venter and Sternberg are
basing their criticisms on SCIENCE instead of political correctness! Of course
the purposefully obscurantist conflation between 'skin color' and ancestry is
something I've dealt
with before.

These individuals would not be classified by geneticists,
sociologists, psychologists, physical anthropologists, or any sort of scientist
as members of the European race. They would not self-identify as white
Americans, nor would they be considered as such. They would be eligible for
affirmative action.

Human races, like dog 'breeds', are defined in the
biological context by shared ancestry, not by single appearance traits. With ancestry
you can predict many genes and many traits, but with single genes or single
traits, you can not predict many other genes or traits. Which is why you
can still easily identify the ancestry of the depigmented individuals in the
above picture. Population ancestry predicts the sum patterns of one's genotype
and phenotypical traits (e.g. general racial appearance) while any single
variable - in this case, skin color - does not.

Denial of this fact was dubbed Lewontin's Fallacy (PDF) by
British geneticist A.W.F.
Edwards. 'Skin color' is a false and intentionally misleading
straw-definition of race, that dishonorable public scientists such as Sternberg
and Venter use to manufacture consent for their ideological viewpoints
about human equality.

Steven Rose argues that the racial grouping 'sub-Saharan
Africans' racistly lumps "diverse populations", but in the next
breath uses such equally problematic and diversity encompassing racial
categories as 'Nigerians' and 'Ethiopians'. And that is the problem with 'race'
criticism, any population concept is diverse and fuzzy - German, Northwest
European, New Yorker, Ashkenazi Jew, Asian - and yet the population concept
is an essential cog in evolutionary science. The Neo-Darwinian
Synthesis that grounded evolutionary theory in genetics, was the vital
fusion of Darwin and population genetics. A population is a race is a
population. To deny the population is literally a denial of evolution.

Race critics don't and could never explain satisfactorily
why groupings like 'sub-Saharan Africans', 'Mediterranean', or 'Dutch' have no
place in science, and more importantly the way scientists do use such
groupings in practice belies
the alleged uselessness (that is, like intelligence, the population concept
clearly allows them to perform 'normal science'). And,
yes, Dr. Rose, 'African' is a genetically
meaningful entity:

In one of the most extensive of these studies to date,
considering 1,056 individuals from 52 human populations, with each individual
genotyped for 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, we found that individuals
could be partitioned into six main genetic clusters, five of which corresponded
to Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East
Asia, Oceania, and the Americas

You'll note, also, that this coauthor of the extreme
anti-hereditarian tract Not
In Our Genes also suggests marathon running ability in Ethiopia has a
genetic component. This belief has become socially acceptable, but the evidence
for genetic differences in population intelligence is hardly less spectacular
than the evidence for this difference. I don't recall the large transracial
adoption study that tested for marathon running. Each of these inferences can
be based on the cross-cultural consistency and physiological
correlates (PDF) of performance. It is ideology, not data, which keeps Rose
from drawing the same inferences about the intelligence difference. It is also
ideology that allows Rose to keep his job for this comment, while Watson lost
his job for his substantively identical, yet socially taboo comment.

The claim that there has not been enough time for
evolution to act on non-superficial traits is not scientific. First because
nonsuperficial traits take no more time to evolve than superficial traits. More
importantly, reasonable selection parameters allow for significant differences
to arise between populations in 100 years, much less 100,000. Richard Lynn
argues that genetics account for 1.3 SD in intelligence between sub-Saharan
Africans and Europeans. Genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending illustrates
how a 1 SD difference in a hypothetical trait, with a lower additive
heritability than intelligence, could evolve in 500 years:

... [A]ssume time preference has an additive heritability
of 25%. Assume that everyone with time preference more than 1 sd above the mean
of the distribution has double the fitness of everyone else. About 16% of the
population then has twice the number of offspring as everyone else on average.

After a generation of reproduction the new mean time preference will be
increased by (0.2 * .25) or 5% of a standard deviation. In 20 generations, 500
years, time preference should go up by a full standard deviation.

This is similar to Cochran
and Harpending's model (PDF) for the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence.
Also allowing for .5-1 SD higher intelligence in mere centuries.

... the argument that the 100,000 years or so since the
dispersal out of Africa were insufficient for the evolution of genetic
differences is invalid. To create an IQ difference of, say, 15 points between
two populations in 100,000 years, natural selection would have to drive their
IQs apart by only 0.004 points every generation - about 1% of the selective
pressure in late 20th-century America

Furthermore, is it true that races only differ in a few
appearance related genes? Nope. We already have
this data and it's not true by a long shot. Nick Wade reported
early last year in the New York Times:

In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr.
Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear
to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date
of these selection events is 6,600 years ago.

Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion,
suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since
the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they
may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the
Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods.

Some of the genes are active in the brain and, although their role is not
known, may have affected behavior. So perhaps the brain gene changes seen by
Dr. Pritchard in East Asians have some connection with the psychological traits
described by Dr. Nisbett.

In fact, far from being identical, virtually all
genes that are related to individual differences in human health and behavior
differ to some degree in their frequency between racial populations. This is
something you can and should test for yourself.

Gene Expression blogger p-ter recently wrote a very nice
post titled So
You Want to be a Population Geneticist. This is a How-2 for several genetic
databases that can be used by anyone with an Internet connection to search for
allele frequencies or signatures of selection. You can use these to look at the
gene frequencies of the four population groups from the International
HapMap Project: Utah whites, Nigerian Yoruba, Han Chinese, and Tokyo
Japanese.

You'll note then that the International HapMap Project is
designed to illuminate the genetic differences between these four
"sliced-up", "arbitrary", "diverse",
"genetically meaningless" racial populations, that are "defined
by skin color". Didn't the HapMap people get the memo from SCIENCE that
these categories are a racist biological fiction???

Go into Google News, and look under search terms like 'gene'
and 'genes',
and pick any random recent news items reporting an association between some
gene/s and some sort of individual differences. This would not include studies
that e.g. talk about genes that differentiate humans or chimpanzees, or that
claim no individual differences.

Take the genes you find in the news and plug them into the HapMap Genome
Browser , using p-ter's tips, and look how the frequencies differ. We even
have an
open thread for you to test your own hypotheses and report your findings
from these databases. Unlike Watson's righteous regulators, we don't believe
your hypotheses are immoral or "beyond the point of acceptable
debate".

Posters on the Half
Sigma blog recently used p-ter's post to see how CHRM2, a gene described
as the first "yielding consistent evidence of association with IQ
across multiple studies conducted by independent research groups", was
distributed across the HapMap populations:

T is *way* more present than A in rs324650 among East
Asians (91%) relative to Europeans (47%) and blacks (27%). Since T is
associated with an increase in 4-5 points of performance IQ (what is that,
anyway? Is that different from G?) that is significant.

The poster 'Marc' continued by examining how alleles
differed for DTNBP1:

Let's look at rs:760761, rs:2619522 and rs:2619538, all of
which are associated with increased or decreased intelligence in DTNBP1.

Regarding rs:760761, 18% of Europeans carry the T allele, which knocks about 8
points off the ol' IQ, compared to around 7% of East Asians and 37% of blacks.

Regarding rs:2619522, the numbers are similar. 18% of whites carry the G
allele, which knocks about 7 points off the ol' IQ, versus around 8% of Asians
and 35-36% of blacks...

Regarding rs:2619538, 61% of whites carry the T allele, which adds about 6.5
points to one's IQ, versus about 1% of Asians and 67% of blacks...

If 6% more blacks carry the T allele than whites (67% vs. 61%) on rs:2619538,
and the T allele codes for 6.5 FSIQ (full scale IQ) points, then this gives
blacks an advantage of .4 IQ points over whites from this SNP.

Also, if 60% more whites carry the T allele than Asians, and the T allele codes
for 6.5 FSIQ points, than this gives whites an advantage of 3.9 IQ points over
Asians from this SNP.

So the cumulative effect thus far would be:
minus 3.6 points for blacks relative to whites;
and minus 0.2 points for East Asians relative to whites.

A difference in one or two "intelligence genes"
does not by itself suggest that one population is smarter than another, because
evolutionary environments select for phenotypes not genotypes. So when
populations have many genetic differences, the genes may interact in different
ways, and some of the genes that make individuals more intelligent in one
population may not have the same effect in another. (In other words if we'd
prefer to not take the above results at face value, we have to accept that
races are even more genetically different, not less)

However, several pieces of evidence make it doubtful that
most intelligence genes are like this. For one, mixed race people generally
have IQ scores about midway between their parent populations. (save one study
of Eurasian mixes) So I would say the gradual accumulation of similar results
for other "intelligence genes" would certainly serve as evidence for
the genetic viewpoint.

These differences do illustrate, in yet another way, the
falseness of popular arguments that races are genetically identical, or that
genetic differences can somehow only exist for "appearance genes".
But virtually any gene showing individual differences that you plug in those
databases will also be distributed differently among racial groups and
demonstrate the same points.

James Watson om rase

Science
is no stranger to controversy. The pursuit of discovery, of knowledge, is often
uncomfortable and disconcerting. I have never been one to shy away from stating
what I believe to be the truth, however difficult it might prove to be. This
has, at times, got me in hot water.

Rarely
more so than right now, where I find myself at the centre of a storm of
criticism. I can understand much of this reaction. For if I said what I was
quoted as saying, then I can only admit that I am bewildered by it. To those
who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is
somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not
what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific
basis for such a belief.

I
have always fiercely defended the position that we should base our view of the
world on the state of our knowledge, on fact,
and not on what we would like it to be. This is why genetics is
so important. For it will lead us to answers to many of the big and difficult
questions that have troubled people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
[...]

In
[helping to bring the human genome project into existence], I knew that many
new moral dilemmas would arise as a consequence and would early on establish
the ethical, legal and societal components of the genome project. Since 1978,
when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E O Wilson for saying
that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural
genetics by wishful thinking
has remained vigorous.

But
irrationality must
soon recede. It will soon be possible to read individual genetic messages at
costs which will not bankrupt our health systems. In so doing, I hope we see
whether changes in DNA sequence, not environmental influences, result in
behaviour differences. Finally, we should be able to establish the relative
importance of nature as opposed to nurture. [...]

We
do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in
the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do
different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that
equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the
case is not enough. This is not science.

To
question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about
superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences,
about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very
likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance
of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human
objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves
in this great debate, should take
care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence.

... [M]ight it be fair also to
say that the champions of 'no difference' in race or sex, or intelligence ...
are the guardians of a greater 'untruth' that allows people to live together in
mutual harmony, implying that these critics really deserve to be praised as our
protectors even when they are factually wrong? ... it is roughly how the
self-appointed guardians choose to present themselves - leaving aside, usually,
the step of frankly admitting that they are promoting factual untruths when
they know that they are.